January 5, 2018

Have you ever had a day when you just want to throw something? Well, it’s probably optimal if you choose an object that is meant to be thrown. Playthings such as softballs, paper airplanes, water balloons, and Frisbees count among the items which get the go-ahead for a wind-up and release. As I mentioned in a previous blog about toys people throw, “Sometimes I like to throw for distance and speed, other times for accuracy. Trajectory, body mechanics, kinetic energy, and velocity are part of the formula. Those factors (combined with other variables) determine how far you can throw something, what direction it will take, and how fast it will go.” Although flying discs and Frisbees are objects that you more-or-less “flick and fling,” relying heavily upon wrist motion, I categorize them as “throw toys” and they rank among my favorite things to heave.

When and how did flying discs and Frisbees originate? Predecessors of the modern Frisbee were predominantly made of metal and can be traced back several centuries to the first Olympic Games in Greece in 708 BC when discus throwing was part of a pentathlon event. Later, in 2nd-century BC India, warriors used a disc with sharpened outer edges, called a chakram, as both a throwing weapon and a hand-to-hand combat tool. In the 14th century, a horseshoe-like game, quoits, appeared in England as early as 1388. Simply a ring tossed over a stick target, quoits remains still popular among sporting clubs in England and the U.S.

December 19, 2017

I grew up in a family of makers before the Maker Faire existed. My grandmothers could knit, sew, make jewelry, or hand hook a rug. They were the early generation of makers who would "use it up, wear it out, make it do" in order to make things last. My parents knew about organic gardening, fine tailoring, hand painting folk art whirligigs, and repairing furniture. Our house was filled with craft projects and lots of creativity. Parties with friends involved papermaking, bookbinding, pottery, tie-dye, and batik. Quiet weekends were spent watching other people make things on PBS’s The New Yankee Workshop. During outings or shopping trips, my parents would say, "We could make that!" I grew up making things, in a family that collects antiques, with a subscription to Smithsonian magazine. Based on that background, it seems like I’ve been training my entire life to be a conservator. Conservation requires science, art, creative thinking, manual skills, and a certain type of personality that enjoys repetitive tasks. Recently, I created replacements for miniature basketball nets in the museum’s Hoop It Up arcade game using macramé. I saw the deteriorated originals and said to myself, "I could make that." And, sure enough, I did. Undoubtedly my crafty grandmothers would be proud.

But I’m not alone in my interest in and affection for creative pursuits. Playing by making always promises the result of having a new thing. Remco offered an exciting way to build your own toy cars with Barney's Auto Factory Motorized Assembly Line. A car chassis rolls down the assembly line as kids add parts and customize a toy car. Safety features were not much of a concern in the early years of maker toys and building sets. The 1950 Gilbert Atomic Energy Set came with radioactive materials and a comic book in which the cartoon character Dagwood shows how to split an atom. In the 1960s, kids could play with Mattel’s Creepy Crawlers by making plastic bugs with a hot toaster oven and die-cast molds. Advertisements for Creepy Crawlers told kids that "all you need to make a bug is a Thing Maker set and an electric plug." Kids could also transform sheets of plastic into toys and badges with Mattel's Vac-u-Form Thing Maker set. Perhaps after years of playing with Thing Maker a few kids grew up to be industrial designers.

December 1, 2017

As explored in Euromonitor International’s “Global Licensing Trends in Children's Apparel and Footwear” report, characters dominate children's fashion licensing as the majority of these franchises target children. After children pass the age of eight, other licensing types provide fiercer competition to character licensing including fashion, music, celebrity and sports. Outerwear is the largest licensed childrenswear category while nightwear and underwear continue to be strong. As design/fashion become more important, partnerships between character licensors and designer brands respected by adults are increasingly being experimented on.

November 28, 2017

On November 9, 2017, Wiffle Ball took its place of honor in the National Toy Hall of Fame, joining 64 other classic toys and games. Introduced in 1953, the Wiffle Ball represents the optimism of the postwar era and the romanticism of life in the suburbs. Part of the Wiffle Ball’s charm is that it remains relatively unchanged since its introduction. The orange, black, and white Wiffle Ball box today features nearly the same typeface and instructions on how to throw the ball as it did originally; on occasion the box depicted a celebrity such as Thurman Munson, Catfish Hunter, or Paul Winchell and Jerry Mahoney. The game rules and dimensions for the field of play prove simple enough for players to make it their own. And play with a Wiffle Ball grants the pitcher with the magic of illusion thanks to its founder’s perseverance.

It all began in Fairfield, Connecticut in 1952 when David Nelson Mullany watched his 12-year-old son and a friend play a pick-up game with a perforated plastic golf ball and a broomstick. Based on the kids’ creative adaptation of baseball, Mullany decided that postwar American suburbia did not have “enough room for two teams, enough space for a field,” and neighborhood baseball games led to “too many broken windows.” Mullany batted around a few ideas and he began to cut holes in ball-shaped plastic containers he commandeered from a nearby cosmetics manufacturer, with his son stepping up to the plate to test the designs. As a retired semi-pro baseball pitcher, Mullany also wanted a design that made it easier for his son to throw curve balls. Through trial and error, the Mullanys determined that a ball with eight oblong slots cut into one hemisphere worked best at grabbing the air and diverting the ball’s trajectory. The pitcher could easily throw a curve, a slider, or a knuckle ball. Players used a thin purpose-built bat, which further advantaged the pitcher by handicapping the batter. Their version of the revised game produced a good number of strike-outs, called “whiffs” in the Mullany’s neighborhood.

October 28, 2017

Although I sometimes roll my eyes at the new commemorative “holidays” that get added to the calendar, I’m actually delighted to see that November 4, 2017 has been declared the first annual National Easy-Bake Oven Day. I can’t promise that I’ll be sending greeting cards to my friends and family to honor the occasion, but it’s good to know that one of the classic toys in the National Toy Hall of Fame is drawing renewed attention—naturally by way of Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

Personally, some of my favorite Easy-Bake Oven memories come from the autumn of 2006 when The Strong was preparing to induct the toy into its National Toy Hall of Fame. Growing up, I’d never had the opportunity to use an Easy-Bake Oven, so I announced to my Collections Team colleagues that we were going to dedicate a Friday afternoon to cooking with a couple of them in my office and eating our creations, so that we could speak with authority on the topic whenever the media asked. And I learned a lot in the process. First of all, cooking with an Easy-Bake Oven taught me patience. It took about 15 minutes for the oven to warm up, another 15 minutes for a cake to bake, and then 10 minutes for the cake and pan to cool down sufficiently enough to touch. That’s 40 minutes to wind up with a dessert the size of a hockey puck! In that same amount of time, I could have whipped up a batch of brownies the size of a car hood in a regular oven. But that’s not really the point of the Easy-Bake, is it? The Easy-Bake Oven offers kids their very own appliance, one that isn’t controlled by parents. The time it took to produce each Easy-Bake cake persuaded me that, when I needed to make a dozen Easy-Bake cakes for a photo shoot as part of the 2006 induction, I faked it by baking a yellow cake in a cookie sheet and then extracting suitably-sized disks using a large biscuit cutter.